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Sunday, June 8, 2008
The Green Problem
Evidently this was an issue even 150 years ago, when Asher B. Durand commented on "the common prejudice against green." "I can well understand why it has been denounced by the Artist," he wrote, "for no other color is attended with equal embarrassments."
Here is a plein-air study where I tried to match the colors that I saw without modifying them.
There is no doubt that green is a fundamentally important color. Many modern psychologists and color theorists regard it as a primary, not a secondary, color: indeed green is a primary color of light. The word "green" is occurs more than twice as frequently as "yellow" in modern written English. The human eye is more sensitive to green wavelengths than to any other; that's one reason why flourescent lights are designed to give a peak output in the green range.
So why do many painters recoil in horror from certain pigments, like permanent green light or pthalo yellow green? Why do many artists banish green from the palette?
A friend of mine who is a landscape painter said, "One thing I've been noticing in doing studies outdoors recently is that the greens are very intense, often a pale acid yellow green in the grass when sunlight is on it. Yet I rarely see that intensity in past plein studies except perhaps in the later Impressionists. I think there must have been a conscious decision by artists to mute the greens they see in Nature towards gray or a warm brown. I find myself tempted to impose upon nature a more moderate interpretation of color sensation based on some aesthetic / psychological convention."
For those of us trying to be true to Nature, should we be faithful to our mistress, or is there a legitimate reason to neutralize the strength of green? Why should there be a problem with green? What has been your experience?
One more bit of trivia: 79% of the flags of Europe contain red, while only 16% contain green.
Thanks to Handprint.com for the color diagram.
30 comments:
- John P. Baumlin said...
I admit to having a love/hate relationship with green. I have done paintings that had quite a bit of green in them and found myself fighting to tame them, make them somehow less jarring. I'm reminded of a quote from an artist whose name I forget: "There are only two kinds of green. Green and damn green."
I don't agree with the quote and despite my slight aversion to green, I put a lot of thought into what pigments combine to produce the most pleasing greens; cool greens, warm greens, gray-greens.
I have found that greens alongside some kind of violet or blue-violet are very pleasing and interesting. It may be that they seem a logical chromatic extension of the blues.
Anyway, I loved your plein air study...but look at the lovely juxtaposition of blues and greens!
- June 8, 2008 at 10:54 AM
- Unknown said...
Oddly, my first book from Tor has an almost entirely green illustration from Stephan Martiniere. (See http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0765317087/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link -- though the Amazon scan has gray shifted it quite a bit from the actual illustration.) It has exhibited very strong cover appeal on the shelf, to the point where the hardback sell through was excellent.
Even more oddly, my third book from Tor is entitled Green, and the early marker comp I've seen of the cover also relies heavily on the color green.
- June 8, 2008 at 11:12 AM
- Wendy said...
I have to admit that I as totally unaware of this 'problem' and that I use green a lot in my painting. Sometimes I think that artists think too much. I usually find that if I try to consciously think about everything I am doing that my picure ends up being less effective than when a lot of the decision making is done subconsciously.
- June 8, 2008 at 11:49 AM
- jeff said...
I mix my greens, I have Viridian on my palette, but I mix this as well.
You can mix greens from a fair amount of combinations from Ivory Black and Cad Yellow Light to Purple Blue and Cad Yellow or any yellow for that matter.
I had a teacher who I studied landscape painting with and he would have us mix greens to maple leaves, we were in Vermont.
The top side of the leaf is rich bright green depending on the time of year of course, and the underside is more defused in chroma. The idea was to mix greens that were not to acidic.
We mixed 9 values of greens the first 6 using a Munsell notation were 1.5 through 6.
This green was mixed using Ultramarine Blue with a little Alizarin, (a violet) and then mixing it with Cad Yellow Lt.
The next 3 values 7 - 9 were mixed using very little Pthalo Green(I use Viridian now) with White and Cad yellow Lt. This got a little tricking and it was easy to get acidic greens.
I think if you mix green using some violet that you can control it better.
I also have a strings of grays and blues to help control the chroma and values.If I use the complete palette it has strings of greens, violets, and blues.
For the landscape painter there is the issue that you can't compete with nature. That paint can only cover so much value and chroma wise.
So I think for me anyway that I try to come up with a good harmonic devises that works within the context of the painting.
- June 8, 2008 at 12:14 PM
Honestly, I had no idea that there was a green "problem." It's interesting to ponder, however. The only reason I can think of for a green prejudice might be because it's so dominant in most landscapes. Perhaps some just get tired of it.
I happen to be quite fond of green, and don't people fill their houses and flowerbeds with green plants? Maybe the range of greens in nature is just too wide for most artists to replicate skillfully. I admit most of the art on my walls is neutral to warm colors, as with most of my furniture. The houseplants provide the cool greens in my decor.
- June 8, 2008 at 12:20 PM
- Raluca said...
Green is one of my favorites and I love to see it around in clothes,bags,plants,old trees in my windows,but i just have to say your post made me noticed something:my tubes of green watercolor are untouched,when all the others are more or less used!So,clearly,even if I´m a big fan of green in daily life,when it come to paint I keep a certain distance!I still remember some beautiful portraits I saw in dominant green,I still consider the green-olive and violet in all nuances are great together,the same with green and orange,which is a very eye catching combination(but maybe this is more personal,because remind me of some sweet things from childhood:)),but is neverless true:blue sky with green land on canavas make me feel like something is missing,like a stage without characters!Still I like your study a lot,but how many can play with a landscape like this and manage to make it atractive?Congratulations!I appreciated also the comments before,lot of interesting info!!
- June 8, 2008 at 1:43 PM
- Erik Bongers said...
I only mentioned a dozen times on this blog that I'm slightly colorblind. So here I go again for those who haven't read it: I'm slightly colorblind.
As my sensitivity to green is much weaker then, ahum, 'normal' people, green gives me a lot of pains.
Quite often viewers remark that my greens are too strong.
Although I must say I've heard people disagree on this over my drawings/paintings.
Reason I'm bringing this up is that I think their might be some scientific explaination to The Green Problem in Art.
1. about 10% of male humans are slightly colorblind and thus have a weaker vision for green (or red).
2. A certain amount of woman also have a 'defect' but quite the opposite : they don't have 3 types of cone cells to detect red, green and blue, but a 4th one to detect yellow-green light!
A wiki page on Tetrachromacy.
So what we have here is a clash of the sexes : 10% of males have a weaker vision in the red to green region, while 10% of the women have a stronger sensitivity to those colors.
It's even worse, it's a clash between 'normal' people, colorblind people and color-super-women.
My solution to please all is to add an orange wash to my paintings, especially the landscape parts (not the skyes).
And orange, is technically light-brown isn't it?
So am I not doing the same as those academic painters that applied a thick and dark layer of brown over their paintings?
p.s. I looked at jaylake's book cover. The colors do not please me(sorry): I do see it's green, but it looks cold and gray (unsaturated green) to me. As I think this is due to my little handicap, about 10% of males may agree with me. That's 10% less income for a writer.
To recap : I think the differences in color vision we have may have caused artist to find a way to please all, that is, stay clear of green!
- June 8, 2008 at 1:49 PM
- Laura Zarrin said...
I love your plein-air piece. Green is probably my favorite color and I gravitate towards it in art and home decor. I guess I am unique in that. Go Green!
- June 8, 2008 at 1:52 PM
- poggy said...
I generally just lurk around here and take note of all of James' precious tips, but since the audience's opinion is requested, I'll try to throw my 2 cents in the discussion.
I don't know if it's because I'm a woman (:-D), but I like a touch of green in my colors. Like James' friend, I often notice how strong the greens (and other colors too, actually) are in nature - but they'd probably look too fake if reproduced like that in any visual media. Odd, isn't it?
This said, I think that when used as a dominant color green suggests lack of air and light. I don't know if it's because we tend to associate it to some kind of clinical atmosphere. I also saw that Frank Frazetta used a lot of green in his jungle paintings - not just because the jungle is green (duh!), but because, I think, it gives a rather "dark" feeling to the picture. It makes the viewer rather uncomfortable, but it also stands out... So probably all those gallerists and book cover designers are right, to an extent. But it's because green causes strong reactions, like red.
This said, I find the colder shades of green among the most relaxing colors. Perhaps it's because they make me think of mint syrup, lol! :-DDDDD
Re: costume designers - it's also true that green looks awful on most people with a pale complexion, making it paler if not yellowish.
- June 8, 2008 at 2:19 PM
- stephen erik schirle said...
poggy, green clothing on a pale red headed girl is the greatest color combination known to man!!
- June 8, 2008 at 5:27 PM
- Doug said...
My problem with GREEN is that if I want to paint the landscape here in Tennessee, everywhere I look I see GREEN. The grass and fields are GREEN. The trees are GREEN... the trees in the background are GREEN and the hills in the distance are GREEN. Of course, the GREEN varies in all these things.... but still everywhere I look I see GREEN. Where are the purple mountain majesties and amber waves of grain when I need them? :0)
- June 8, 2008 at 10:21 PM
- Paolo Rivera said...
I've actually been giving this a lot of thought lately.
Unless I'm painting the Hulk, I tend not to use any green at all (and even then, it's subdued). But in addition to that, I only use yellow when I'm painting a green object in a painting. I find that yellow turns just about every mixture into green unless there's red to counteract it. Most of the yellow in my paintings comes from the undertones of my burnt umber and sienna, both of which have dominant red components.
Also, I've been painting a lot of olive drab lately for WWII army uniforms, but it's just a simple mix of jet black and yellow ochre (I paint mostly in gouache and acrylic).
As for any reluctance to greenish casts, I would imagine a large part of that stems from skin tones, which tend to look "unhealthy" when green unless a surrounding environment of cool color resets our white balance.
- June 9, 2008 at 12:31 AM
- Shane White said...
Ha...this is so timely!
When designing one of my new sites I specifically went for the "yellowish-green" that for years art directors and clients alike have had such predjudices against. And I always wondered why?
Personally I like green quite a lot because it can be a neutral for a cool or warm color that can bend in either direction.
My hope is that the strength of my work attracts the kind of clients I want.
At least that's the theory anyway.
Here's the culprit:
- June 9, 2008 at 1:36 AM
I'll second what Raluca wrote - I like the colour green, but now, when I come to think about it, I realize that I very rarely use it.
One exception is, ironically, for a book cover I've made.
- June 9, 2008 at 1:44 AM
- poggy said...
Stephen, I sai most people, not all people with a pale complexion ;-) Unfortunately, being pale and dark haired, most shades of green are a no-no for me... unless I get a bit tanned ;-)
- June 9, 2008 at 4:27 AM
I'm a lurker but the subject of green fascinates me so I'll raise my head above the parapet.
I would hazard a guess that the problem with green is that the natural green seen in leaves and grass etc. can't be reproduced exactly in paint, textiles and lighting and as such, we're repelled by the unnaturalness of it.
I've got a huge oak tree staring at me outside my window right now and the leaves aren't green, they're a mix of almost white veins on the leaves, dark veridian shadows leaning to brown, yellow highlights and even a bit of orange here and there on dead leaves and twigs. The same with grass, there are little accents of white where the grass has dried and brown where you can see the earth.
Reproduced greens can't capture all the different shades simultaneously (there are exceptions in paintings however before I go over generalising) and fall flat. The green leather seen on clerk desks and in our house of commons is a prime example (to me) of a repulsive green. It's just too.....green. The connotations with the items and surroundings may also play a part but there's my thoughts.
- June 9, 2008 at 7:05 AM
- Peter Angel said...
I'm guessing here, but I assume that most people would hang a painting in common areas - lounge rooms and dinning rooms. And the green in the painting would stand alone as the main green in these rooms. Few people would have a green sofa or a green table cloth.
I read somewhere that paintings the contain pink or slightly colored greys are the easiest to sell, as most lounge rooms and dining rooms have some pink and some light colored greys in the,
- June 9, 2008 at 8:56 AM
- jeff said...
I think the question of green is all about context.
I can see painting a portrait using a verdaccio under-painting and not painting over it well enough so the figure is leaning to much to green as a problem.
In landscape I think it's a question of design, composition and so on.
If you look at Clyde Aspevig's work you can see that he uses this idea to great advantage.
You don't notice the green at all you notice the painting.
My painting teacher told us many moons ago that green in landscape painting failed usually because it was to acidic, and that we as painters had to find a harmonious resolution to this problem.
That is some greens are by nature acidic, and when you try to paint them this can lead to a magnification of the effect.
He stressed always mixing the most non-acidic greens at the right values and that if you nailed this no one would notice.
- June 9, 2008 at 9:25 AM
- LJay said...
this is very interesting... I had never really known of this before. I myself love green - my bedroom and study walls and alot of my clothes are green etc.
I am in my final year of studies doing landscape architecture. Our last studio project was helping to sort out a small coastal town which has seen a great deal of development in the past 5 or so years and is likely so see a great deal more in the future - I digress...
Anyway as part of the project we presented our initial concept masterplanning to the community (which was well recieved) and one small criticism that we got out of it about a week later, was that our plans (graphically) were too green! not really an issue about our designs but certainly about the representation of them...
- June 9, 2008 at 11:49 AM
- James Gurney said...
These are really helpful and insightful comments. I realize that I have overstated the case about the "green problem," and I should qualify it a bit. The issue is not with the color itself, or its use in clothing, etc. I count myself as an enthusiastic supporter (and wearer!) of green.
The problem I'm really talking about is what Doug mentioned, GREEN everywhere, unmodulated chlorophyll-green (one friend of mine calls it "vegetable green") in landscape painting.
That's the problem Durand was talking about, too, and his remedy was to look carefully for variation in the green colors of natural foliage, so it's not all one color. In fact one of the things he was responding to was the tendency for his fellow Hudson River painters to paint only autumn scenes, and he was advocating an approach to painting summer landscapes, which, if you're not careful, tend to that "damn green" John mentioned.
I agree with Jeff and Paolo and others that the key to greens is careful mixing, and that's why I sometimes don't bring tube colors of green on location in the summer. If I have to mix the greens from their components, I'm more likely to get variety.
- June 9, 2008 at 12:56 PM
- Carolyn said...
Back when I was studying light design as a theatre major in college, the first rule we learned was to never, ever use green light unless we were staging a horror scene. And I don't know why, but it is completely true. Green light makes actors look menacing or sickly. It makes scenery look ominous. And green costumes reflect green light and that's why they're almost never used, with the exception of Gone With the Wind, I think.
But in real life, I get a lovely green light that reflects off my magnolia tree and shines into my bedroom. It's always a nice sign of spring. But maybe if I were to stand in that green light, I wouldn't look as nice as I do under a pink light. (In a green shirt.)
- June 9, 2008 at 3:01 PM
- Rich said...
I suspect that humans have become so sensitive to green because that quality aided our chances of survival. We're really good at seeing green, just the way we're really good at reading human faces...because it's important to know whether something/someone is good/bad for us.
As for using it in paintings, I struggled with it until I began to use Munsell to analyze landscapes, florals, etc. and seeking color harmony became much less problematic.
- June 9, 2008 at 3:35 PM
- jeff said...
I also forgot to mention that good understanding of atmospheric perspective and and without studying this one wont get a handle on how to create the illusion of depth in a painting.
As things recede they lose chroma and become more defused.
I always use gray scales(Munsell)to help control the HVC and as I mentioned before I also mix Blues, Greens and sometimes Violets that relate to the Gray scales in value.
This is a lot of mixing, but for me it helps as I can look at the palette and it already reads as a landscape in the abstract.
- June 10, 2008 at 10:36 AM
- Chris Oatley said...
I was just wrestling with this YESTERDAY!!! Amazing that I would come over to the 'journey,' seeking inspiration and find not just some more inspiration, but an entire post devoted to my plight.
Thanks, James!
- June 11, 2008 at 8:58 AM
This may sound funny, but I like green because it is rich. Thanks to it`s friends positive impact, blue and yellow, green is so refreshing. Especially when the sun shines through all kind of young and adult leaves, granting us splendour.
ps.: By the way, I really fell in love with this blog as soon as I found it! Very good job.
pss.: This is awesome, because I now have found THE creator behind Dinotopia! That book, dad said would be too expensive and couldn´t be tolerated because there were people riding on dinosaurs. [...]
For many years there lived only some dinosaur pictures on in my mind, and almost faded into oblivion. A few years later, the Jurassic Park movie hit the theatres and that was a small compensation. To my shame I have to admit, that I never did a research on this Dinobook again. There was no internet way back then, and the two volumes at the bookstore were sold out fast. And then...over the years I must have forgotten. There seemed to be more important things than dinosaur stories with pictures. Hmm, but somehow the circle is getting complete. Well almost, at least until I have enough jinx to spend on these marvelous volumes.
psss.: And last but not least Mr. Gurney, I wish you many, many more happy years of excellence while creating these fantastic stories and paintings.
- June 12, 2008 at 8:22 PM
- Casey Klahn said...
Great post on "green". Could it be that the fellow who describes past greens as muted doesn't realize that it is a mixed color?
I have to disqualify myself from making observations about public green prejudice. As an artist, I am wholly enamored of green.
- June 15, 2008 at 11:05 AM
- Allison Dollar said...
I have a problem using green straight out of a tube. But, I have problems using a lot of colors straight out of the tube.
For green I use a bright, spazzy modern yellow with black or indigo. The modern yellow isn't too quick to tone down, so I get a nice green.
I only use viridian green with alizarin to make a beautiful blue. And a bit of yellow ocher or cad yellow makes a nice green with that.
I must say in landscapes, I use a lot of red and blue, and then add the greens and yellows to the painting.
I think the problem might be getting the value of the greens right. We know somethings off, but we can't see past the jarring color we just put down. So we just shy away from the color. I know I've done that before. But I haven't done much landscape recently. I should get back to that before winter hits.
- September 7, 2008 at 2:17 AM
- Jenny Dolfen said...
Thank you so much for this article! I always thought I was strange for avoiding the colour green in paintings, apart from when my entire colour scheme is predominantly green. All this makes perfect sense. An extremely interesting read!
I have an answer, at least, for why European flags contain hardly any green - green was not considered a classical heraldic colour (or tincture), so that the flags that are derived from medieval heraldic devices contain little or no green.
- August 29, 2011 at 8:57 AM
- Rhissanna said...
This has been fascinating reading. I'll have to go back and look at my work and see how much green is there.
But part of this, surely, links back to John Constable. To quote;
"Constable was having an argument with a friend about conventions of representation in landscape painting. The friend was trying to persuade him to paint grass as Poussin did, in the honeyed tones of an antique violin. To refute him, it's said, Constable took a violin and laid it on the lawn, inviting him to make a direct comparison between the two. Painted grass should be the same colour as real grass, was his point."
Maybe the aversion to green grass was part of a deeper issue about the perception of green and the differences between nature and paint.
- April 23, 2012 at 1:27 PM
- Ted B. said...
Interestingly, I ran your landscape through my color analyzer and the most common "green" was less than 8-percent of the composition. Nearly 60-percent were actually non-green elements even though it appears to green-dominant--with 12 differents shades of greens, yellow-greens and blue-greens.
My suspicions are that many artists use greens with too much chroma in a landscape and a too-narrow hue-band between yellow and blue, lending to an unfavorable overall impression.
- December 19, 2018 at 12:00 AM


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subset: commoncrawl


text:
Most surveys of the US public indicate that scientists are popular, trusted figures. The same, however, cannot be said about some of their conclusions, as topics like climate change and evolution remain controversial with many segments of the population. A recent Pew survey gives an indication of why: even though the scientific community's opinion is largely unified on these topics, the public thinks that there is significant dispute among the researchers. A study published by the Journal of Risk Research attempts to explain why this might be the case.
The people behind the new study start by asking a pretty obvious question: "Why do members of the public disagree—sharply and persistently—about facts on which expert scientists largely agree?" (Elsewhere, they refer to the "intense political contestation over empirical issues on which technical experts largely agree.") In this regard, the numbers from the Pew survey are pretty informative. Ninety-seven percent of the members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science accept the evidence for evolution, but at least 40 percent of the public thinks that major differences remain in scientific opinion on this topic. Clearly, the scientific community isn't succeeding in making the public aware of its opinion.
According to the new study, this isn't necessarily the fault of the scientists, though. The authors favor a model, called the cultural cognition of risk, which "refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values." This wouldn't apply directly to evolution, but would to climate change: if your cultural values make you less likely to accept the policy implications of our current scientific understanding, then you'll be less likely to accept the science.
But, as the authors note, opponents of a scientific consensus often try to claim to be opposing it on scientific, rather than cultural grounds. "Public debates rarely feature open resistance to science," they note, "the parties to such disputes are much more likely to advance diametrically opposed claims about what the scientific evidence really shows." To get there, those doing the arguing must ultimately be selective about what evidence and experts they accept—they listen to, and remember, those who tell them what they want to hear. "The cultural cognition thesis predicts that individuals will more readily recall instances of experts taking the position that is consistent with their cultural predisposition than ones taking positions inconsistent with it," the paper suggests.
They're not the first to reach this conclusion—they cite extensive literature, by both themselves and others, indicating it's in operation—but they do a good job of attempting to demonstrate it in action. To do that, they focus on three issues that tend to break down on political/cultural lines, but have been addressed on an empirical level by the National Academies of Science. They break the cultural groups into two camps: individualistic and hierarchical, which could loosely be described as pro-business and anti-regulation, and egalitarians, who are more likely to favor government intervention.
The scientific issues that were examined are:
- Climate change, and whether it's anthropogenic. The NAS says yes on both counts, and egalitarians are expected to accept it, while individualistic individuals are likely to reject it due to its regulatory implications.
- The safe handling and storage of nuclear wastes. Again, the NAS says it's possible, and the authors expect that egalitarians will oppose it on environmental grounds.
- The safety implications of concealed carry laws. Individualists would be expected to favor these on individual liberty grounds, while egalitarians would oppose them. In this case, they'd both be wrong; the NAS has concluded that there's insufficient evidence to tell.
They looked at the public's take on these issues via a survey of 1,500 US adults, conducted in July of last year. A series of questions broke down where each participant fell on the individualistic/hierarchical and egalitarian/communitarian scales. Then, they were give a series of statements about the scientific issues above, i.e., "Global temperatures are increasing," and asked whether expert scientists agreed with the statement.
As expected, the participants that were more accepting of government regulations overwhelmingly accepted that global temperatures are increasing (78 percent) and that humans were likely the cause (68 percent). In contrast, a small majority (56 and 55 percent) of the pro-business participants felt that the experts were divided on these topics; a significant faction actually felt that most experts disagree with the consensus position.
A similar breakdown came with concealed weapons laws. For individualists, half thought the experts agreed that they were good for public safety, and 40 percent thought the experts were divided. Roughly the same number of egalitarians agreed that the experts were divided, but nearly half thought the exact opposite of the individualists, namely that experts thought that the experts disagreed that they decreased violent crime.
Oddly, a statement on the safe storage and disposal of nuclear waste left the audience very divided, with the same percentage of both groups (45 percent) thinking that the experts were divided. The expected differences did show up in the agree/disagree categories, but were far less pronounced.
Explaining the discrepancy
So, how do these differences arise? To get at that, the authors created fictitious biographies for expert scientists, portraying them as members of the NAS. They then provided each with a fictitious book excerpt that placed them at one or two of the extremes of opinion (again, for climate change and nuclear waste, one extreme represents the consensus; for concealed carry laws, both extremes are wrong).
Here, the differences became even more apparent. Egalitarians accepted the expertise of someone suggesting climate change was high risk at a rate of 88 percent; the low-risk author was rated an expert a bit less than half the time. For individualists, in contrast, the low-risk author was considered an expert 86 percent of the time; the high-risk author was rated an expert by less than a quarter of participants. A nearly identical pattern prevailed for concealed-gun laws, while nuclear waste expertise was rated as mixed.
So, it's not just a matter of the public not understanding the expert opinions of places like the National Academies of science; they simply discount the expertise associated with any opinion they'd rather not hear.
The authors suggest that this information can be useful for scientific organizations that are interested in reaching a broader audience; by phrasing matters in a way that would appeal to both individualists and egalitarians, and providing experts that can speak in the appropriate terms, they suggest, different cultures can be reached with the same scientific information. In short, they favor a framing approach.
We're not entirely certain this would work. In the case of some of these issues, there are organizations (pro-coal and pro-gun groups, for example), which can provide people who are just as adept at speaking in these terms, and are therefore likely to be accepted as experts. In short, this seems like a recipe for convincing the public that the scientific community is divided, even when it's not. Figuring out how to overcome the public's tendencies to accept only what it wants to hear (assuming that's possible) seems to be the only way to avoid this situation.
Journal of Risk Research, 2010. DOI: 10.1080/13669877.2010.511246 (About DOIs).


text:
Barbra Streisand will sing at the Oscars
Staff Writer
Columbus Monthly
NEW YORK (AP) — Barbra Streisand will perform at the Oscars next month, the first time she's performed during an Academy Awards broadcast in 36 years.
Streisand won the Academy Award for best original song for "Evergreen" in 1977. She also sang the theme from "A Star Is Born" that night.
She won the Oscar for best actress for 1968's "Funny Girl."
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences also announced Wednesday that British singer Adele will perform at the Oscars. She and producer Paul Epworth are nominated for best original song for the James Bond theme song, "Skyfall."
The 85th Academy Awards air live Feb. 24 on ABC from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.


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Linsky's witch hunt
As I explain in greater detail in an editorial today, I've got a couple of problems with the inquiry launched by Rep. David Linsky's House Post-Audit Committee into housing and food assistance received by the Tsarnaev family. First, it looks like blatant headline-chasing. I don't understand why intelligent people like Linsky take the Herald and the talk radio ranters so seriously. Besides, the FBI, CIA, DHS, BPD, ATF and prosecutors from at least two Massachusetts counties and countless other agencies are already investigating the Tsarnaevs. Do they really need the House Post-Audit Committee to join the hunt?
Linsky's response, I trust, would be that those other agencies won't investigate whether state bureaucrats improperly authorized their food stamps and Section 8 housing vouchers (and I hope they won't). And if Linsky wants to investigate state administrative procedures for awarding need-based benefits, that's fine with me. What I object to is the implication, from the likes of Rep. Shauna O'Connell ("I'm concerned that the taxpayers and victims here may have been funding terrorists, and people have a right to know if that is the case, and they have the right to know immediately," she said), is that the problem isn't that the Tsarnaevs aren't eligible for the benefits. It's that they are "terrorists." The implication is that state employees in welfare offices should vouch for the politics, religion and the potential criminal intent of applicants in addition to getting them to answer questions about household finances.
That would be unwise, illegal and stupid. The crimes allegedly committed by the Tsarnaev boys in April 2013 should have no bearing on whether they were improperly awarded housing subsidies and food stamps years before. I respect Dave Linsky and assume he understands that concept, which means this investigation is mostly political pandering.


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Amazon.com shocked customers yesterday when it reached out to hundreds, if not thousands of Kindles and simply deleted texts that users had not only purchased, but had started to read. A literary coitus interruptus, Amazon spoiled the readers' descent into Orwellian masochism with nary a warning or apology.
Sometime on Thursday, users had an eerie feeling that they were being watched, receiving emails stating that their purchases were being refunded. When they connected to the Kindle's WhisperNet, the purchases in question were automatically deleted. Some could only wonder: how often could this happen? Perhaps the Thought Police Amazon Customer Service team could cut off your books whenever they wanted to.
With Amazon's tramping on the works of Orwell, customers felt their utopian world of tree-saving e-book consumption trampled upon. They lamented their un-e-books, finding themselves feeling hollow. With what could their hearts be filled to restore the escape they crave?
(OK, we'll stop with the forced 1984 allusions now.)
The story first popped up when customers began crying foul on the Amazon community, and several sites covered it, including the NYTimes. What no one could determine for certain was "why" this was happening. Amazon's email to customers gave the impression that the publisher had a change of heart: "Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store." That didn't tell the whole story, however.
Ars Technica has learned that this was more serious than a publisher flippantly changing course. Accusations that Amazon had caved to the powerful meanderings of a "major publisher" were far off the mark, although the cause is still unsettling. As it turns out, the books in question were being sold by Amazon despite being unauthorized copies. The works weren't legit. It was all copywrong. In other words, Amazon was selling bad books. Hot letters. Pilfered paragraphs.
MobileReference, the publisher in question, formats and sells public domain books on Amazon. The only problem is that George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 are not yet in the public domain, at least not in the US. According to Amazon's statement to Ars Technica, "These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books." When the publisher informed Amazon of this, Amazon moved to rectify the situation. The two books are no longer listed on MobleReference's website, either.
But does Amazon's Terms of Service even allow for this kind of "rectification"? Peter Kafka examined the ToS and believes that there is no backing for this move. The ToS makes it sound as if all sales are final:
Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.
One possible loophole would be in the licensing: Amazon cannot license to you something for which it has no rights to license. Also, we suspect that some indemnification clauses in the third party contracts also put the publisher, not Amazon, on the hook for possible infringement problems.
So why would Amazon remove the books? It appears as though Amazon's purchasing system does this automatically. The company told Ars that they are "changing [Amazon's] systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances."
Bravo to that, but it would have been better for Amazon to tell customers of this planned change directly, in the first place. And why was the system designed to reach out and remove books, anyway?
No word on what Amazon will do to make sure that the books offered by third parties are properly licensed. We wouldn't be surprised to see the company rake over its third party offerings just to be safe.


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AFRICANGLOBE – A Key West, Florida resident who police say was distraught over the presidential election results and worried about his business has apparently killed himself.
Police say they found Henry Hamilton's body in his bedroom Nov. 8, along with a living will with handwritten words "Do not revive! (expletive) Obama!" Two empty prescription empty pill bottles were in the dining room.
Hamilton's homosexual lover Michael Cossey told Key West police he last saw Hamilton when they watched the election results together. According to the police report, Hamilton was upset and said, "If Barack gets re-elected, I'm not going to be around."
Cossey says Hamilton was anxious about his tanning business. Police say Cossey found Hamilton's body after returning home from a night of playing cards with friends.
Authorities do not suspect foul play.


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My last post got linked, republished and talked about, apparently. We got a lot of traffic as a result.
I suppose I should be tempted to sink back into the morass of the climate wars and go for the big traffic that might justify my adding ads to the site. For now I'm going to resist. There are too many places where people can go to talk about climate change, and too few where energy is the focus. And I think this might be the only one with a micro focus on energy consumption.
Energy consumption. The worry of mine that gave birth to this weblog is that we are underestimating future energy consumption and as a result are sleepwalking into a world where coal becomes (again) the default fuel used to power the rise of the developing world. We're not doing the infrastructure planning that will allow nuclear, hydroelectric, wind/solar/biofuels and even natural gas to take some of the burden off of old king coal.
Specifically, in the near term I project that the world will use 947 quads in 2035, far more than the 712 estimated by the DOE EIA, the IEA and the U.N. I also project it will only get worse after 2035, leading to an incredible 3,000 quads every year by 2075.
Of course this will have an effect on climate–even if atmospheric sensitivity is as low as I think (and hope), the brute force effect of the emissions associated with that much consumption of coal will impact our climate.
I've tried to show it and discuss it. So far, more than 22,000 visits to this blog have maybe convinced a few hundred people that I have a case. I hope so.
On to today's topic. The Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration has published their Early Release of the U.S. Annual Energy Outlook for 2013.
Some key points:
- Domestic production of crude oil is increasing and is expected to continue to increase, reaching 7.5 million barrels per day by 2019
- Our consumption of natural gas is also expected to increase, from 6.8 trillion cubic feet per year in 2011 to 7.8 trillion cubic feet in 2019
- They have increased their projections of generation from solar and wind, from 13% of the total in 2011 to 16% in 2040. The EIA is not so optimistic about advanced biofuels, lowering the predicted output from all biomass from their 2012 prediction of 5.4 quads to 4.2 quads by 2035
- With improved efficiency of energy use and a shift away from the most carbon-intensive fuels, U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide
(CO2) emissions remain more than 5 percent below their 2005 level through 2040
- They have upped their prediction of GDP growth per year, from 2.5% to 2.6% CAGR through 2040.
- As for the reason I was so eager to look at the report… they obviously don't agree with me. They predict that total energy consumption will rise by a total of 7% by 2035, from 98 quads in 2011 to 104 quads in 2035 and then by 6% to 2040 to a total of 108 quads. (I think it will be higher.)
- Their justification still centers around their belief that energy intensity will decline as total U.S. population increases by 29 percent from 2011 to 2040, but energy use grows by only 10 percent, with energy use per capita declining by 15 percent from 2011 to 2040. I want some of what they're smoking
Overall, I still think they're looking too much at the inputs to their models–pricing and supply constraints, availability etc., instead of accepting that the demand for fuel is not very price sensitive and will be driven by population and GDP growth. Energy efficiency will surely help us out. But we've picked a lot of the low hanging fruit from that tree, and future progress in energy efficiency will be progressively more difficult.


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LAUSANNE, Switzerland – IOC leaders dropped wrestling from the Olympic program on Tuesday, a surprise decision that removes one of the oldest Olympic sports from the 2020 Games. The IOC executive board decided to retain modern pentathlon – the event considered most at risk – and remove wrestling instead from its list of 25 "core sports." The decision was first reported by The Associated Press. The IOC board acted after reviewing the 26 sports on the current Olympic program. Eliminating one sport allows the International Olympic Committee to add a new sport to the program later this year. Wrestling, which combines freestyle and Greco-Roman events, goes back to the inaugural modern Olympics in Athens in 1896. "This is a process of renewing and renovating the program for the Olympics," IOC spokesman Mark Adams said. "In the view of the executive board, this was the best program for the Olympic Games in 2020. It's not a case of what's wrong with wrestling, it is what's right with the 25 core sports." Adams said the decision was made by secret ballot over several rounds, with members voting each time on which sport should not be included in the core group. The figures were not disclosed. IOC President Jacques Rogge did not vote. Wrestling featured 344 athletes competing in 11 medal events in freestyle and seven in Greco-Roman at last year's London Olympics. Women's wrestling was added to the Olympics at the 2004 Athens Games. Wrestling will now join seven other sports in applying for inclusion in 2020. The others are a combined bid from baseball and softball, karate, squash, roller sports, sport climbing, wakeboarding and wushu. They will be vying for a single opening in 2020. The IOC executive board will meet in May in St. Petersburg, Russia, to decide which sport or sports to propose for 2020 inclusion. The final vote will be made at the IOC session, or general assembly, in September in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is extremely unlikely that wrestling would be voted back in so soon after being removed by the executive board. "Today's decision is not final," Adams said. "The session is sovereign and the session will make the final decision." The last sports removed from the Olympics were baseball and softball, voted out by the IOC in 2005 and off the program since the 2008 Beijing Games. Golf and rugby will be joining the program at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro. The IOC program commission report analyzed more than three dozen criteria, including television ratings, ticket sales, anti-doping policy and global participation and popularity. With no official rankings or recommendations contained in the report, the final decision by the 15-member board was also subject to political, emotional and sentimental factors. Previously considered under the closest scrutiny was modern pentathlon, which has been on the Olympic program since the 1912 Stockholm Games. It was created by French baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic movement. Modern pentathlon combines fencing, horse riding, swimming, running and shooting – the five skills required of a 19th century cavalry officer. The sport's governing body, the UIPM, has been lobbying hard to protect its Olympic status, and the efforts apparently paid off. UIPM President Klaus Schormann had considered traveling from Germany to Lausanne for the decision, but decided to stay away. "The Olympic movement always needs history," Schormann told the AP ahead of the IOC decision. "You cannot just say we look only at the future. You can have a future when you are stable on the basic part of history. We are continuing to develop, to renovate, to be innovative and creative. We are very proud of what we achieved so far and want to deliver this as well for the next generations in 2020."
Olympics: IOC drops wrestling from 2020 games
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Speed Racer – Movie Review
Speed Racer is a cinematic cocktail of Science Fiction, Action Adventure and Fantasy…so despite the fact that neither Racing nor Cars do much for me, the movie struck a chord. Not only because I love those genres, or because the movie is a visual treat and one of the most entertaining movies I have seen in recent times, but also because it made me feel something. Not many Hollywood movies do that for me but two things in this movie get you all emotional. One is the underlying theme of filial love and family values and even more important – the passion that one needs to have for what one does…in this case Racing.
Sure, I agree with most reviewers when they say the plot isn't worth talking about but inspite of that one is not disappointed…now how many movies can keep you glued to your seat without a credible plot and that too for two hours fifteen minutes? The focus isn't on the plot at all. The story is simply used as a tool to showcase the beautiful colourful glitzy fantasy world of racing cars that is so alive that the cars can double up as ninja fighters and the racing tracks blaze and daze, taking you on a lunatic roller coaster ride. Half an hour into the movie I felt a little dizzy.
The movie is not all animation…all characters are real actors. It's the background (including the cars) which is completely animated. That not just adds a fantasy like atmosphere to the movie, it makes everything believable because right from the start we are sucked into a fantasy world where anything is possible. Suspension from disbelief works at its best. We are drawn into a vortex of a world where racing cars zip through the air, performing unimaginable stunts. Everything is more than a trifle exaggerated, including the way the characters are presented. They have been photofinished to look almost like cartoon characters and even the way they behave is slightly extreme.
The story opens with our hero Speed (Emile Hirsch) as a kid in school. He has a passion for only one thing in life – racing. He fails at everything else but despite that has the complete support of this family. Speed's dad (John Goodman) is an idealistic car designer and maker and elder brother Rex a racing car driver who Speed idolizes. Everything turns topsy turvy when a tragedy befalls Rex and a villain in the form of the head of an evil corporation (which makes racing cars) pops up and offers to "buy" Speed. After that it's all up to our young hero. He has to do his stuff and prove that racing isn't about money, it's about the passion and talent for driving, and he proves it in heroic style.
I was a little surprised that the New York Times trashed this movie because usually I agree with their reviews. They didn't like the movie because it didn't have a credible story and was far too melodramatic. I think the movie is too melodramatic for western tastes…but at no point in the movie was I looking for any kind of realism. Heck, it's pure fantasy taking place in a futuristic world. The directors make no pretense at realism.
The movie is a technological extravaganza (cost 120 million to make), and the unusually bright colours that literally explode in your face alongwith the clever editing and amazing stunts that never leave you with a dull moment. There's a touch of humour too in the form of Speed's younger brother and his pet monkey whose antics which are sprinkled liberally throughout the movie.
The movie is a remake of a Japanese cartoon (anime) series and written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski, the Matrix people. That itself meant something to me as The Matrix is one of my favourite movies of all time.
It's a movie that adolescents and kids will enjoy and some adults too, if they are like me. If you want to see a movie because its realistic, then forget about it! And oh yes, this movie isn't worth seeing on video. You need a big screen.
Related Reading: More Movie Reviews
Review of Iron Man


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Getting Mountain Lion's new system-wide notifications to work best for your own needs may take a little adjusting. Notification Center gives developers an official, standardized way to send notifications to the user, but also a way to consolidate and control those notifications. We show you how to make the most of what this first desktop incarnation of Notification Center offers.
Apple provides system-wide notification APIs to developers, but it is up to them to support it. Apple has naturally included support in its own apps, such as Mail, Messages, and Reminders; Safari also supports notifications sent from webpages using the Web Notifications API. Some Twitter clients, such as the Tweetbot alpha, support notifications, but alas, the languishing official Twitter client does not. Other applications, such as Outlook 2011, still rely on their own notification system. Plenty of others rely on Growl, a popular third-party OS X notification system that thankfully can still run on Mountain Lion.
Taking control
Like iOS's Notification Center, configuration can be found in two places. The first stop is System Preferences, where there is a unified Notifications preference pane for controlling what style of notification an app uses, whether or not its messages are allowed to pile up in the Notification Center, and whether or not it can display a badge on its app icon or play a sound. Anyone familiar with iOS should be at home with these options.
For each app, you can choose one of three "alert styles:" the self-explanatory "none;" "banners," which slide down from the top right corner of your main display and disappear in a puff of smoke after a brief pause; and "alerts," which stay on the screen until you dismiss them. Think of banners as transient—best for information that you might want to know but isn't critical. Alerts stay pinned to the screen until you deal with them; these are best for important things like reminders or appointment alerts.
You can also tick a checkbox to allow an app to play a sound or update an icon badge. For instance, you may not want a banner or alert to distract you from your work when updates from the Mac App Store become available, but you may want its Dock icon to show how many updates are available so you can check at a glance. And, if you're the sort that likes your computer to makes sounds (I admit, I'm one of them), you can control whether an app can play a sound when it sends an alert here as well.
Finally, you can have an app's notifications pile up in the Notification Center. You can control how many notifications will stay pinned there—just choose from 1, 5, 10, or 20 most recent. Again, this lets you check at a glance what's been happening to some background app while you were busy doing something else or away from the computer and banners were otherwise popping up and disappearing.
In all, the system is pretty flexible, and it offers a lot of control over exactly how distracted you allow yourself to become.
The Notifications preference pane also allows you to control the sorting order of the Notification Center. You can have it sort automatically by time, placing the app with the most recent notification at the top, or manually. If you're using manual sorting, you control the order by dragging and dropping apps within the list in the preference pane. Again, this is quite similar to the functionality built in to iOS.
Fire when ready
Controlling exactly what events can trigger a notification, however, takes more work. You'll have to make a trip to a particular app's preferences, and here's where things get a little more tricky—it's up to a particular app's developer to give users the control they want. For instance, the Tweetbot alpha offers a lot of control over what kind of mentions fire off a notification. There's also an option to get an alert when someone starts following you, when your tweets are retweeted by others, and when someone marks a tweet as a "favorite."
Mail also offers configurable control over alerts. The preferences allow you to choose whether automatic notifications are sent whenever something comes in to any mailbox or just your inbox. Or, you can have alerts fire when an e-mail comes from anyone in your contacts or just Mail's new "VIPs."
However, Mail's rules can now be configured to send alerts, so you can get an alert whenever an e-mail comes from certain senders, has certain attachments, or whatever criteria you can think up. This offers quite a bit of flexibility for power users inclined to dig in to the rules system.
(Apps like Reminders and Calendar have no specific notification controls, though both apps are, in a sense, entirely designed around setting notifications.)
If your favorite app doesn't have the control over notifications that you need, your best bet is to plead with the developer. If it's one of Apple's own apps, though... well, you'll need to complain to Apple.
Keep it centralized
Finally, there's Notification Center itself. Its icon now occupies the upper right menubar target once given exclusively to Spotlight. Click on the icon, and Notification Center slides in from the right.
You can also use a trackpad gesture to slide the Notification Center into view: slide two fingers from the right of the trackpad and across it. Slide both fingers back off the right side of the trackpad to slide the desktop back over it. The gesture takes a little getting used to, but feels very natural once you get the hang of it.
The Notification Center will post all the recent notifications in a list, sorted by time, for each app (as configured in the Notifications preference pane). One interesting behavior we noticed is that notifications from one of OS X's includes apps automatically clear once that app is brought to the front. Notifications from non-Apple apps must be cleared using a small "x" button in its list header.
One particularly nice feature about Notification Center is that you can temporarily disable all notifications by scrolling down to reveal a "show alerts and banners" switch. Turn it off, and all alerts and banners will be silenced. You can switch it back on manually, or let it automatically resume the next morning. This should keep you from missing potentially important notifications if you would otherwise have forgotten to turn them back on. While this switch is off, notifications still collect in the Notification Center.
This "don't bug me today" switch can also be activated by option-clicking the Notification Center menubar icon. When banners and alerts are turned off, the icon turns a subtle shade of gray as a visual clue about its on/off status.
Notification Center also includes the ability to send a quick tweet via Twitter. You have to add your Twitter account to the Mail, Contacts, and Calendars preference pane—even if you use the official Twitter app. Once you do, a "Click to Tweet" button appears at the top of Notification Center. Click it, type your message, and hit "Send." It's not particularly faster than using a separate Twitter client in our experience, but the option is there. Later this fall, you'll also be able to send a Facebook status update using a similar interface.
Finally, a "gears" icon at the bottom of Notification Center lets you jump to the Notifications preference pane in System Preferences.
In all, Mountain Lion's system-wide notifications offer a lot of flexibility, though we expect it will become much more useful once more third-party developers find useful ways to support it. Even if you merely use the capabilities baked into Apple's own apps, however, there's plenty to keep you aware of what's happening while you're working on some task in Photoshop, Word, or another app. And if the notifications become more of a distraction, Notification Center's off switch makes it easy to silence them—at least until the next work day.
If we had any major complaint, it's that Notification Center on both OS X and iOS cry out for a scheduling option. For instance, perhaps I only want notifications about emails coming to my Ars Technica e-mail address to bother me during work hours. Likewise, I'd probably like to shut off most or all notifications after, say, 10pm on most nights. Perhaps Apple can work on that feature for the next version of OS X.